Où est Al Gore? se demandait FOXNews.com dans cet article facétieux publié hier, en précisant que l'ex-vice-président avait brillé par son absence et son silence au cours des trois derniers mois. Eh bien, Gore signe ce texte publié il y a peu de temps sur le site internet du New York Times dans lequel il réagit aux controverses qui ont ébranlé son camp au cours des derniers mois. Vous me pardonnerez cet extrait dans la langue de William S., célèbre climatologue :
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere - as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel's scientists - acting in good faith on the best information then available to them - probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
(Photo AFP)